v0.11's New Features and Abilities!

Heyo everyone! Quite a handful of changes this time around. Some of them may be fairly important to know before diving into the next build. I was able to get to most of the things I was hoping to, but with 1 snag.

Before I get into things, I'd just like to announce that the winner of the poll was Rooster! Zol'gan2 will be the next level with the final totals being:
(P= Patreon votes, SS = SubscribeStar votes)

Zol'gan2 - 14 (P: 14 + SS: 0)
Titas2 - 12 (P: 11 + SS: 1)
Finale1 - 6 (P: 6 + SS: 0)
Neos2 - 4 (P: 4 + SS: 0)

With that, let's get into this week's breakdown!

Day 1:

On the Sunday, the most front and center things was to implement Lana's EX ability. This upgrade is simple. Instead of firing regular power blast shots, she will instead fire flame waves at the same rate. This means she will decimate clusters, as well as do quite a bit more damage.

With that, I moved on to the other essential. Lana's next 2 dialogue trees. With it completed, she officially has all 4 dialogue trees finished.

Day 2:

With the essentials in place, this now opened up the ability to tackle some extras.

First up is something you might have kinda of noticed in the previous gif with Lana. I'll start with a quick explanation:

Because the Raptura2 boss only really gets hurt in a certain phase, I felt their health bar showing at all times was pretty important for the player to understand what is happening. Now, as we know, boss health bars only show when Pix is in the party. I've decided to make a decision based on this. Pix has been given a new passive, and Boss Health Bars will always show, regardless of who's in the party across the game.

So what is Pix's new Passive? It is still called "Scouting", but the effect is now that you essentially have wall hacks. You can see enemies through walls and obstructions.

This paired with Flame wave could be a good way to take out those obstructed enemies.

With the new changes in place, there was enough time for 1 more thing.

 We gave Lana her extra hairstyle.

Day 3:

Progress was going quite smoothly, so I thought it might be cool to take another step in some "jank". I'm sure many of you probably notice how sometimes there is a "selected" button, and it just chills there while you are going through menus with a mouse. I've made some adjustments to the scripts so that when you are using a mouse, any other buttons will deselect.

This isn't massive, but it should make navigating menus feel less weird. The game now internally tracks what your last used device was between gamepad and mouse to help with the flow of both.

This leads us to something else that's pretty overdue.

Custom Keybinds! Yippppeeee. There are still a couple other things I need to do to make this fully come together, like the bound keys displaying in-game and in party select. It also won't really work with gamepad yet, but I'd like to see if I can cover these things before this build's launch.

That being said, in it's current state it is fully functional with keyboard and mouse controls.

With a little bit of time left in the day, I decided to squeeze in the description for Lana's EX.

Day 4:

Now this day... was a tough one. I wanted to take a look at custom colors for Aether. In previous posts I talked about how I got the code all lined up and functional for it, all that was needed was to address the atlases (.pngs used in animations). Basically I would need to go through alllll the Images used in previous Hscenes, and change Aether's color to white, with an appropriate multiplicative tint for the shading. I found a workflow/process to get this to work previously, so I decided to put this into practice on this day.

Something I knew was going to be a bit of a hurdle was how the images were broken up. Some Atlases are simply not broken up with this function in mind. Unfortunately this proved to be an even bigger hurdle than I originally thought. In what I thought might be achievable within a day turned into a realization that it would likely be more along the lines of a week's worth of work, as not only would I need to address the atlases, but I would also need to completely rework components within the rigs. Some Hscenes are easy enough, but not others.

While I was able to make some headway on this end, and got some Hscenes up and functioning with it, I ultimately had to leave this one behind for now. I will come back to it another time.

Day 5:

Here I decided to drop back to an old idea I had. I had originally scrapped it, but I decided to bring it back now. I feel it gives a more solid sense of "progression". You likely noticed in a gif above that the characters have a blue "!" above their buttons.

This signifies a "character event". This will appear when you hit a new threshold with a character:

Event 1: Upon unlocking
Event 2: 25 Affinity
Event 3: 50 Affinity (Upon beating their 2nd level)
Event 4: 75 Affinity

When you interact with them, you will enter some brief, 1 directional dialogue that leads directly into the newly unlocked Hscene.

You do have the option to skip the Hscene, in case you wanted to talk to them for a different reason.

These events are only viewable once, and simply serve as a segway into Hscenes, and a means of alerting the player of when they've made progress in regards to the character.

This took a bit of time, as I wrote 4 events for all 6 characters

These dialogues are kept brief to not feel too obstructive, but can give a little more context to how the characters are feeling through the adventure.

Unfortunately the flags to initiate these events were just implemented. That means if you are resuming a current save from an old build, you will need to get through all of these events to catch up with your progress.

Alongside this I made a couple small changes to the ordering of Hscenes. I have decided to make it so Lana's BJ scene is now her 1st Hscene, and the Cockpit is her 2nd. Likewise I swapped Tanya's 1st and 2nd Hscene around. Up until now, the Hscene orders have been simply in the order they were made. Once development is done, or as things get closer, the order of Hscenes may be rearranged like this.

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Which leads us to today! That pretty much sums up this week.

In the coming week I will be doing Build Wrap up. This will include finishing up some of the mechanics with Raptura 2 that need topping off, attaching the new scenes to the game, etc.

Thanks again everyone! I'll catch you all next week! Thanks again for the amazing support!

-Regulus